Written Bassa

In the late 1800s a young Bassa man went to study medicine at Syracuse University in the US. When Dr. Thomas Flo Narvin Lewis returned to Liberia in 1910, he brought, besides a medical degree, a Bassa alphabet he had developed. This was one of five indigenous scripts in Liberia.

A more recent, Latin script is used for the Bassa Bible. All the characters for this later script are available in unicode, so they should be viewable from most browsers. For the character mappings used on this site, see the character map.

To type Bassa, you need to remap your keyboard to include special Bassa characters and tone marks. For Windows computers, you can get a keyboard conversion program from Tavultesoft. For more information, see also SIL’s site.

You can also type Bassa on a Linux computer with unicode. Unicode characters allow many languages around the world to be viewed properly on browsers and other computer applications. For details on typing Bassa with Linux, contact Tim Slager.

The Bassa Vah script has been submitted as a unicode character set by Charles Riley and Michael Everson. Once the Vah script is implemented, computers will be able to type the old Vah script as well as the newer Bassa.

The Bassa translation team developed a word list while they worked on the translation. Our thanks to the Translation team:

Don Slager

Seokin Payne

Robert Glaygbo

Tim Meece

William Boen

Congratulations for your persistence and dedication, which have led to the completion and publication of the entire Bassa Bible!